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. P56 
1881a 
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THE 



Scholar in a Republic, 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. 






The Scholar in a Republig 



ADDRESS 

AT THE 

CEI^TElSTISriAL AITITIYEESAEY 

OF THE 

PHI BETA KAPPA 

OP 

HAEYAED COLLEGE 

JUNE 30, 1881 

BY 

WENDELL PHILLIPS 



BOSTON 
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK 
CHAKLES T. DILLINGHAM 






" Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues 
that Babel cleft the world into , yet, if he had not studied the solid 
things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing 
so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman competently 
wise in his mother dialect only." — Milton. 

"I cannot hut think as Aristotle (lib. 6) did of Thales and 
Anaxagoras, that they may be learned but not wise, or wise but 
not prudent, when they are ignorant of such things as are profit- 
able to them. For suppose they know the wonders of nature and 
the subtleties of metaphysics and operations mathematical, yet they 
cannot be prudent who spend themselves wholly upon unprofitable 
and ineffective contemplation." — Jeremy Taylor. 

"The people, sir, are not always right." 
"The people, Mr. Grey, are not often wrong." 

Disraeli's ^^Vivian Grey." 

"Chains are worse than bayonets." — Douglas Jerrold. 

" Hadst thou known what freedom was, thou wouldst advise us 
to defend it not with swords but with axes." — Spartans to the Great 
King's Satrap. 



coptbiqht, 1881, 
By lee and SHEPARD. 

In 



exciang-Q 
^'^y 16 1916 



THE 

SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 



Mr. Presidext and Brothers of the P. B. K. 

A HUNDRED years ago our society was planted — 
a slip from the older root in Virginia. The par- 
ent seed, tradition says, was French, — part of that con- 
spiracy for free speech whose leaders prated democracy 
in the salons, while they carefully held on to the flesh- 
pots of society by crouching low to kings and their 
mistresses, and whose final object of assault was Chris- 
tianity itself. Voltaire gave the watchword, — 

" Crush the wretch." 
" Ecrasez I' infame." 

No matter how much or how little truth there may be 
in the tradition : no matter what was the origin or what 
was the object of our society, if it had any special one, 
both are long since forgotten. We stand now simply 
a representative of free, brave, American scholarship. 
I emphasize American scholarship. 

In one of those glowing, and as yet unequalled 
pictures which Everett drew for us, here and elsewhere, 
of Revolutionary scenes, I remember his saying, that 
the independence we then won, if taken in its literal 
and narrow sense, was of no interest and little value ; 
but, construed in the fulness of its real meaning, it 
bound us to a distinctive American character and pur- 
pose, to a keen sense of large responsibility, and to a 

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4 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPTJBLIC. 

generous self-devotion. It is under the shadow of such 
unquestioned authority that I use the term " American 
scholarship." 

Our society was, no doubt, to some extent, a protest 
against the sombre theology of New England, where, 
a hundred years ago, the atmosphere was black with 
sermons, and where religious speculation beat uselessly 
against the narrowest limits. 

The first generation of Puritans — though Lowell 
does let Cromwell call them " a small colony of pinched 
fanatics" — included some men, indeed not a few, 
worthy to walk close to Roger Williams and Sir Harry 
Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in 
speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal 
to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane — 
in my judgment the noblest human being who ever 
walked the streets of yonder city — I do not forget 
Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Gar- 
rison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow's 
flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the 
continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire 
equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato 
"all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand 
years : " so you can find in Vane the pure gold of two 
hundred and fifty years of American civilization, with 
no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed 
him to the Academy, and F^nelon kneeled with him at 
the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possi- 
ble ; like Carnot, he organized victory ; and Milton 
pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He 
stands among English statesmen pre-eminently the rep- 
resentative, in practice and in theory, of serene faith 
in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. 
For other men we walk backward, and throw over their 
memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying rev- 



THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 6 

erently, "Remember the temptation and the age." 
But Vane's ermine has no stain ; no act of his needs 
exj)lanation or apology ; and in thought he stands 
abreast of our age, — like pure intellect, belongs to all 
time. 

Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth 
heeding, " Young men, close your Bja-on, and open your 
Goethe." If my counsel had weight in these halls, I 
should say, " Young men, close your John Winthrop 
and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open 
Sir Harry Vane." The generation that knew Vane 
gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, 
— Veritas. 

But the narrowness and poverty of colonial life 
soon starved out this element. Harvard was re-dedi- 
cated Christo et Ecclesice ; and, up to the middle of the 
last century, free thought in religion meant Charles 
Chauncy and the Brattle-street Church protest, while 
free thought hardly existed anywhere else. But a 
single generation changed all this. A hundred years 
ago there were piilpits that led the popular movement ; 
while outside of religion and of what called itself liter- 
ature, industry and a jealous sense of personal freedom 
obeyed, in their rapid growth, the law of their natures. 
English common sense and those municipal institutions 
born of the common law, and which had saved and 
sheltered it, grew inevitably too large for the eggshell 
of English dependence, and allowed it to drop off as 
naturally as the chick does when she is ready. There 
was no change of law, — nothing that could properly 
be called revolution, — only noiseless growth, the seed 
bursting into flower, infancy becoming manhood. It 
was life, in its omnipotence, rending whatever dead 
matter confined it. So have I seen the tiny weeds of 
a luxuriant Italian spring upheave the colossal foun- 



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6 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPTJBLIC. 

dations of the Caesars' palace, and leave it a mass of 
ruins. 

But when the veil was withdrawn, what stood revealed 
astonished the world. It showed the undreamt power, 
the serene strength, of simple manhood, free from the 
burden and restraint of absurd institutions in church 
and state. The grandeur of this new Western constel- 
lation gave courage to Europe, resulting in the French 
Revolution, the greatest, the most immixed, the most 
unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had 
in modern times, unless we may possibly except the 
Reformation, and the invention of Printing. 

What precise effect that giant wave had when it struck 
our shore we can only guess. History is, for the most 
part, an idle amusement, the day-dream of pedants and 
triflers. The details of 'events, the actors' motives, and 
their relation to each other, are buried with them. How 
impossible to learii the exact truth of what took place 
yesterday under your next neighbor's roof! Yet we 
complacently argue and speculate about matters a thou- 
sand miles off, and a thousand years ago, as if we knew 
them. When I was a student here, my favorite study 
was history. The world and affairs have shown me that 
one-half of history is loose conjecture, and much of the 
rest is the writer's opinion.^ But most men see facts, 
not with their eyes, but with their prejudices. Any 
one familiar with courts will testify how rare it is for 
an honest man to give a perfectly correct account of a 
transaction. We are tempted to see facts as we think 
they ought to be, or wish they were. And yet journals 
are the favorite original sources of history. Tremble, 
my good friend, if your sixpenny neighbor keeps a 
journal. " It adds a new terror to death." You shall 
go down to your children not in your fair lineaments 
and proportions, but with the smirks, elbows, and angles 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 7 

he sees you with. Journals are excellent to record the 
depth of the last snow and the date when the May- 
flower opens ; but when you come to men's motives and 
characters, journals are the magnets that get near the 
chronometer of history and make all its records worth- 
less. You can count on the fingers of your two hands 
all the robust minds that ever kept journals. Only 
milksops and fribbles indulge in that amusement, 
except now and then a respectable mediocrity. One 
such journal nightmares New-England annals, emptied 
into history by respectable middle-aged gentlemen, who 
fancy that narrowness and spleen, like poor wine, mel- 
low into truth v/hen they get to be a century old. But 
you might as well cite " The Daily Advertiser " of 1850 
as authority on one of Garrison's actions. 

And, after all, of what value are these minutiae? 
Whether Luther's zeal was partly kindled by lack of 
gain from the sale of indulgences, whether Boston 
rebels were half smugglers and half patriots, what 
matters it now? Enough that he meant to wrench 
the gag from Europe's lips, and that they were content 
to suffer keenly, that we might have an untrammelled 
career. We can only hope to discover the great cur- 
rents and massive forces which have shaped our lives : 
all else is trying to solve a problem of whose elements 
we know nothing. As the poet historian of the last 
generation says so plaintively, "History comes like a 
beggarly gleaner in the field, after Death, the great 
lord of the domain, has gathered the harvest, and lodged 
it in his garner, which no man may open." 

But we may safely infer that French debate and 
experience broadened and encouraged our fathers. To 
that we undoubtedly owe, in some degree, the theoreti- 
cal perfection, ingrafted on English practical sense and 
old forms, which marks the foundation of our republic. 



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8 THE SCHOLAK IN A REPUBLIC. 

English civil life, up to that time, grew largely out of 
custom, rested almost wholly on precedent. For our 
model there was no authority in the record, no prece- 
dent on the file ; unless you find it, perhaps, partially, 
in that Long Parliament bill with which Sir Harry 
Vane would have outgeneralled Cromwell, if the shame- 
less soldier had not crushed it with his muskets. 

Standing on Saxon foundations, and inspired, perhaps, 
in some degree, by Latin example, we have done what 
no race, no nation, no age, had before dared even to 
try. We have founded a republic on the unlimited 
suffrage of the millions. We have actually worked out 
the problem that man, as God created him, may be 
trusted with self-government. We have shown the 
world that a church without a bishop, and a state with- 
out a king, is an. actual, real, every-day possibility. 
Look back over the history of the race: where will 
you find a chapter that precedes us in that achieve- 
ment? Greece had her republics, but they were the 
republics of a few freemen and subjects and many 
slaves; and "the battle of Marathon was fought by 
slaves, unchained from the doorposts of their masters' 
houses." Italy had her republics : they were the repub- 
lics of wealth and skill and family, limited and aristo- 
cratic. The Swiss republics were groups of cousins. 
Holland had her republic, — a republic of guilds and 
landholders, trusting the helm of state to property and 
education. And all these, which, at their best, held but 
a million or two within their narrow limits, have gone 
down in the ocean of time. 

A hundred years ago our fathers announced this 
sublime, and, as it seemed then, foolhardy declaration, 
that God intended all men to be free and equal, — all 
men, without restriction, without qualification, without 
limit. A hundred years have rolled away since that 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLrC. 9 

venturous declaration ; and to-day, with a territory that 
joins ocean to ocean, with fifty millions of people, with 
two wars behind her, with the grand achievement of 
having grappled with the fearful disease that threat- 
ened her central life, and broken four millions of fet- 
ters, the great republic, stronger than ever, launches 
into the second century of her existence. The history 
of the world has no such chapter in its breadth, its 
depth, its significance, or its bearing on future history. 

What Wycliffe did for religion, Jefferson and Sam 
Adams did for the State, — they trusted it to the people. 
He gave the masses the Bible, the right to think. Jef- 
ferson and Sam Adams gave them the ballot, the right 
to rule. His intrepid advance contemplated theirs as 
its natural, inevitable result. Their serene faith com- 
pleted the gift which the Anglo-Saxon race makes to 
humanity. We have not only established a new measure 
of the possibilities of the race : we have laid on strength, 
wisdom, and skill a new responsibility. Grant that 
each man's relations to God and his neighbor are exclu- 
sively his own concern, and that he is entitled to all 
the aid that will make him the best judge of these rela- 
tions ; that the people are the source of all power, and 
their measureless capacity the lever of all progress; 
their sense of right the court of final appeal in civil 
affairs ; the institutions they create the only ones any 
power has a right to impose ; that the attempt of one 
class to prescribe the law, the religion, the morals, or 
the trade of another is both unjust and harmful, — and 
the Wycliffe and Jefferson of history mean this if they 
mean any thing, — then, when, in 1867, Parliament 
doubled the English franchise, Robert Lowe was right 
in affirming, amid the cheers of the House, " Now the 
first interest and duty of every Englishman is to educate 
the masses — our masters." Then, whoever sees farther 



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10 THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 

than his neighbor is that neighbor's servant to lift him 
to such higher level. Then, power, ability, influence, 
character, virtue, are only trusts with which to serve 
our time. 

We all agree in the duty of scholars to help those 
less favored in life, and that this duty of scholars to 
educate the mass is still more imperative in a republic, 
since a republic trusts the state wholly to the intelli- 
gence and moral sense of the people. The experience 
of the last forty years shows every man that law has 
no atom of strength, either in Boston or New Orleans, 
unless, and only so far as, public opinion indorses it, and 
that your life, goods, and good name rest on the moral 
sense, self-respect, and law-abiding mood of the men 
that walk the streets, and hardly a whit on the provis- 
ions of the statute-book. Come, any one of you, out- 
side of the ranks of popular men, and you will not fail 
to find it so. Easy men dream that we live under a 
government of law. Absurd mistake ! we live under 
a government of men and newspapers. Your first at- 
tempt to stem dominant and keenly-cherished opinions 
will reveal this to you. 

But what is education? Of course it is not book- 
learning. Book-learning does not make five per cent 
of that mass of common sense that " runs " the world, 
transacts its business, secures its progress, trebles its 
power over nature, works out in the long run a rough 
average justice, wears away the world's restraints, and 
lifts off its burdens. The ideal Yankee, who " has more 
brains in his hand than others have in their skulls," is 
not a scholar; and two-thirds of the inventions that 
enable France to double the world's sunshine, and make 
Old and New England the workshops of the world, did 
not come from colleges or from minds trained in the 
schools of science, but struggled up, forcing their way 



THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. H 

against giant obstacles, from the irrepressible instinct 
of untrained natural power. Her workshops, not her 
colleges, made England, for a while, the mistress of the 
world ; and the hardest job her workman had was to 
make Oxford willing he should work his wonders. 

So of moral gains. As shrewd an observer as Gov- 
ernor Marcy of New York often said he cared nothing 
for the whole press of the seaboard, representing wealth 
and education (he meant book-learning), if it set itself 
against the instincts of the people. Lord Brougham, 
in a remarkable comment on the life of Romilly, en- 
larges on the fact that the great reformer of the penal 
law found all the legislative and all the judicial power 
of England, its colleges and its bar, marshalled against 
him, and owed his success, as all such reforms do, says 
his lordship, to public meetings and popular instinct. 
It would be no exaggeration to say that government 
itself began in usurpation, in the feudalism of the sol- 
dier and the bigotry of the priest ; that liberty and 
civilization are only fragments of rights wrung from 
the strong hands of wealth and book-learning. Almost 
all the great truths relating to society were not the 
result of scholarly meditation, " hiving up wisdom with 
each curious year," but have been first heard in the 
solemn protests of martyred patriotism and the loud 
cries of crushed and starving labor. When common 
sense and the common people have stereotyped a prin- 
ciple into a statute, then book-men come to explain 
how it was discovered and on what ground it rests. 
The world makes history, and scholars write it, one 
half truly, and the other half as their prejudices blur 
and distort it. 

New England learned more of the principles of tol- 
eration from a lyceum committee doubting the dicta 
of editors and bishops when they forbade it to put 



12 THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 

Theodore Parker on its platform ; more from a debate 
whether the anti-slavery cause should be so far counte- 
nanced as to invite one of its advocates to lecture ; 
from Sumner and Emerson, George William Curtis, and 
Edwin Whipple, refusing to speak unless a negro could 
buy his way into their halls as freely as any other, — 
New England has learned more from these lessons than 
she has or could have done from all the treatises on 
free printing from Milton and Roger Williams, through 
Locke, down to Stuart Mill. 

Selden, the profound est scholar of his day, affirmed, 
" No man is wiser for his learning ; " and that was only 
an echo of the Saxon proverb, " No fool is a perfect fool 
until he learns Latin." Bancroft says of our fathers, that 
" the wildest theories of the human reason were reduced 
to practice by a community so humble that no states- 
man condescended to notice it, and a legislation without 
precedent was produced off-hand by the instincts of the 
people." And Wordsworth testifies, that, while German 
schools might well blush for their subserviency, — 

" A few strong instincts and a few plain rules, 
Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought 
More for mankind at this unhappy day 
Than all the pride of intellect and thought." 

Wycliffe was, no doubt, a learned man. But the 
learning of his day would have burned him, had it 
dared, as it did burn his dead body afterwards. Luther 
and Melanchthon were scholars, but were repudiated by 
the scholarship of their time, which followed Erasmus, 
trying " all liis life to tread on eggs without breaking 
them;" he who proclaimed that "peaceful error was 
better than tempestuous truth." What would college- 
graduate Seward weigh, in any scale, against Lincoln 
bred in affairs ? 

Hence I do not think the greatest things have been 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 13 

done for the world by its book-men. Education is not 
the chips of arithmetic and grammar, — nouns, verbs, 
and the multiplication table ; neither is it that last year's 
almanac of dates, or series of lies agreed upon, which 
we so often mistake for history. Education is not 
Greek and Latin and the air-pump. Still, I rate at its 
full value the training we get in these walls. Though 
what we actually carry away is little enough, we do get 
some training of our powers, as the gymnast or the 
fencer does of his muscles : we go hence also with such 
general knowledge of what mankind has agreed to con- 
sider proved and settled, that we know where to reach 
for the weapon when we need it. 

I have often thought the motto prefixed to his col- 
lege library catalogue by the father of the late Pro- 
fessor Peirce, — Professor Peirce, the largest natural 
genius, the man of the deepest reach and firmest grasp 
and widest sympathy, that God has given to Harvard 
in our day,— whose presence made you the loftiest 
peak and farthest outpost of more than mere scien- 
tific thought, — the magnet who, with his twin Agassiz, 
made Harvard for forty years the intellectual Mecca of 
forty States, — his father's catalogue bore for a motto, 
^' Scire uhi aliquid invenias magna pars eruditionis est;" 
and that always seemed to me to gauge very nearly 
all we acquired at college, except facility in the use of 
our powers. Our influence in the community does not 
really spring from superior attainments, but from this 
thorough training of faculties, and more even, perhaps, 
from the deference men accord to us. 

Gibbon says we have two educations, one from 
teachers, and the other we give ourselves. This last 
is the real and only education of the masses, —one got- 
ten from life, from affairs, from earning one's bread ; 
necessity, the mother of invention ; responsibility, that 



14 THE SCHOLAE IN A REPUBLIC. 

• 

teaches prudence, and inspires respect for right. Mark 
the critic out of office : how reckless in assertion, how 
careless of consequences ; and then the caution, fore- 
thought, and fair play of the same man charged with 
administration. See that young, thoughtless wife sud- 
denly widowed ; how wary and skilful ! what ingenuity 
in guarding her child and saving his rights ! Any one 
who studied Europe forty or fifty years ago could not 
but have marked the level of talk there, far below that 
of our masses. It was of crops and rents, markets and 
marriages, scandal and fun. Watch men here, and how 
often you listen to the keenest discussions of right and 
wrong, this leader's honesty, that party's justice, the fair- 
ness of this law, the impolicy of that measure ; — lofty, 
broad topics, training morals, widening views. Niebuhr 
said of Italy, sixty years ago, " No one feels himself a 
citizen. Not only are the people destitute of hope, but 
they have not even wishes touching the world's affairs ; 
and hence all the springs of great and noble thoughts 
are choked up." 

In this sense the Fremont campaign of 1856 taught 
Americans more than a hundred colleges; and John 
Brown's pulpit at Harper's Ferry was equal to any ten 
thousand ordinary chairs. God lifted a million of hearts 
to his gibbet, as the Roman cross lifted a world to itself 
in that divine sacrifice of two thousand years ago. As 
much as statesmanship had taught in our previous 
eighty years, that one week of intellectual watching and 
weighing and dividing truth taught twenty millions of 
people. Yet how little, brothers, can we claim for 
book-men in that uprising and growth of 1856 ! And 
while the first of American scholars could hardly find, 
in the rich vocabulary of Saxon scorn, words enough to 
express, amid the plaudits of his class, his loathing and 
contempt for John Brown, Europe thrilled to him as 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 15 

proof that our institutions had not lost all their native 
and distinctive life. She had grown tired of our parrot 
note and cold moonlight reflection of older civilizations. 
Lansdowne and Brougham could confess to Sumner that 
they had never read a page of their cotemporary, 
Daniel Webster ; and you spoke to vacant eyes when 
you named Prescott, fifty years ago, to average Euro- 
peans ; while Vienna asked, with careless indifference, 
"Seward, who is he?" But long before our ranks 
marched up State Street to the John Brown song, the 
banks of the Seine and of the Danube hailed the new 
life which had given us another and nobler Washington. 
Lowell foresaw him when forty years ago he sang of, — 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, 
Wrong forever on the throne ; 
Yet that scaffold sways the future : 

And behind tiie dim unknown 
.Standeth God, within the shadow, 
Keeping watch above his own." 

And yet the book-men, as a class, have not yet acknowl- 
edged him. 

It is here that letters betray their lack of distinctive 
American character. Fifty million of men God gives 
us to mould ; burning questions, keen debate, great in- 
terests trying to vindicate their right to be, sad wrongs 
brought to the bar of public judgment, — these are the 
people's schools. Timid scholarship either shrinks 
from sharing in these agitations, or denounces them as 
vulgar and dangerous interference by incompetent 
hands with matters above them. A chronic distrust 
of the people pervades the book-educated class of the 
North ; they shrink from that free speech which is 
God's normal school for educating men, throwing upon 
them the grave responsibility of deciding great ques- 



16 THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 

tions, and so lifting them to a higher level of intel- 
lectual and moral life. Trust the people — the wise 
and the ignorant, the good and the bad — with the 
gravest questions, and in the end you educate the race. 
At the same time you secure, not perfect institutions, 
not necessarily good ones, but the best institutions pos- 
sible while human nature is the basis and the only ma- 
terial to build with. Men are educated and the state 
uplifted by allowing all — every one — to broach all 
their mistakes and advocate all their errors. The com- 
munity that will not protect its most ignorant and un- 
popular member in the free utterance of his opinions, no 
matter how false or hateful, is only a gang of slaves ! 

Anacharsis went into the Archon's court at Athens, 
heard a case argued by the great men of that city, and 
saw the vote by five hundred men. Walking in the 
streets, some one asked him, "What do you think of 
Athenian liberty?" "I think," said he, "wise men 
argue cases, and fools decide them." Just what that 
timid scholar, two thousand years ago, said in the 
streets of Athens, that which calls itself scholarship here 
says to-day of popular agitation, — that it lets wise men 
argue questions and fools decide them. But that Ath- 
ens where fools decided the gravest questions of policy 
and of right and wrong, where property you had gath- 
ered wearily to-day might be wrung from you by the 
caprice of the mob to-morrow, — that very Athens 
probably secured, for its era, the greatest amount of 
human happiness and nobleness ; invented art, and 
sounded for us the depths of philosophy. God lent to 
it the largest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch 
that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the Old World : 
while Egypt, the hunker conservative of antiquity, 
where nobody dared to differ from the priest or to be 
wiser than his grandfather; where men pretended to 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 17 

be alive, though swaddled in the grave-clothes of creed 
and custom as close as their mummies were in linen, — 
that Egypt is hid in the tomb it inhabited, and the 
intellect Athens has trained for us digs to-day those 
ashes to find out how buried and forgotten hunkerism 
lived and acted. 

I knew a signal instance of this disease of scholar's 
distrust, and the cure was as remarkable. In boyhood 
and early life I was honored with the friendship of 
Lothrop Motley. He grew up in the thin air of Bos- 
ton provincialism, and pined on such weak diet. I 
remember sitting with him once in the State House 
when he was a member of our Legislature. With bit- 
ing words and a keen crayon he sketched the ludicrous 
jjoints in the minds and persons of his fellow members, 
and, tearing up the pictures, said scornfully, " What 
can become of a country with such fellows as these 
making its laws ? No safe investments ; your good 
name lied away any hour, and little worth keeping if it 
were not." In vain I combated the folly. He went 
to Europe, — spent four or five years. I met him the 
day he landed, on his return. As if our laughing talk 
in the State House had that moment ended, he took 
my hand with the sudden exclamation, " You were all 
right : I was all wrong ! It is a country worth dying 
for ; better still, worth living and working for, to make 
it all it can be ! " Europe made him one of the most 
American of all Americans. Some five years later, 
when he sounded that bugle-note in his letter to " The 
London Times," some critics who knew his early mood, 
but not its change, suspected there might be a taint of 
ambition in what they thought so sudden a conversion. 
I could testify that the mood was five years old : years 
before the slightest shadow of political expectation had 
dusked the clear mirror of his scholar life. 



18 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPtJBLIC. 

This distrust shows itself in the growing dislike of 
universal suffrage, and the efforts to destroy it made of 
late by all our easy classes. The white South hates 
universal suffrage ; the so-called cultivated North dis- 
trusts it. Journal and college, social-science convention 
and the pulpit, discuss the propriety of restraining it. 
Timid scholars tell their dread of it. Carlyle, that 
bundle of sour prejudices, flouts universal suffrage with 
a blasphemy that almost equals its ignorance. See his 
words : " Democracy will prevail when men believe the 
vote of Judas as good as that of Jesus Christ." No 
democracy ever claimed that the vote of ignorance and 
crime was as good in any sense as that of wisdom and 
virtue. It only asserts that crime and ignorance have 
the same right to vote that virtue has. Only by allow- 
ing that right, and so appealing to their sense of justice, 
and throwing upon them the burden of their full re- 
sponsibility, can we hope ever to raise crime and igno- 
rance to the level of self-respect. The right to choose 
your governor rests on precisely the same foundation 
as the right to choose your religion ; and no more arro- 
gant or ignorant arraignment of all that is noble in the 
civil and religious Europe of the last five hundred years 
ever came from the triple crown on the Seven Hills 
than this sneer of the bigot Scotsman. Protestantism 
holds up its hands in holy horror, and tells us that the 
Pope scoops out the brains of his churchmen, saying, 
"I'll think for you: you need only obey." But the 
danger is, you meet such popes far away from the 
Seven Hills; and it is sometimes difficult at first to 
recognize them, for they do not by any means always 
wear the triple crown. 

Evarts and his committee, appointed to inquire why 
the New-York City government is a failure, were not 
wise enough, or did not dare, to point out the real 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 19 

cause, the tyranny of that tool of the demagogue, the 
corner grog-shop ; but they advised taking away the bal- 
lot from the poor citizen. But this provision would not 
reach the evil. Corruption does not so much rot the 
masses : it poisons Congress. Credit-Mobilier and money 
rings are not housed under thatched roofs : they flaunt 
at the Capitol. As usual in chemistry, the scum floats 
uppermost. The railway king disdained canvassing for 
voters : " It is cheaper," he said, " to buy legislatures." 

It is not the masses who have most disgraced our 
political annals. I have seen many mobs between the 
seaboard and the Mississippi. I never saw or heard of 
any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, 
if not always led in person, by respectability and what 
called itself education. That unrivalled scholar, the 
first and greatest New England ever lent to Congress, 
signalled his advent by quoting the original Greek of 
the New Testament in support of slavery, and offering 
to shoulder his musket in its defence ; and forty years 
later the last professor who went to quicken and lift 
the moral mood of those halls is found advising a plain, 
blunt, honest witness to forge and lie, that this scholarly 
reputation might be saved from wreck. Singular com- 
ment on Landor's sneer, that there is a spice of the 
scoundrel in most of our literary men. But no exacting 
level of property qualification for a vote would have 
saved those stains. In those cases Judas did not come 
from the unlearned class. 

Grown gray over history, Macaulay prophesied twenty 
years ago that soon in these States the poor, worse than 
another inroad of Goths and Vandals, would begin a 
general plunder of the rich. It is enough to say that 
our national funds sell as well in Europe as English 
consols; and the universal-suffrage Union can borrow 
money as cheaply as great Britain, ruled, one half by 



y 



20 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 

Tories, and the other half by men not certain that they 
dare call themselves Whigs. Some men affected to 
scoff at democracy as no sound basis for national debt, 
doubting the payment of ours. Europe not only won- 
ders at its rapid payment, but the only taint of fraud 
that touches even the hem of our garment is the fraud 
of the capitalist cunningly adding to its burdens, and 
increasing unfairly the value of his bonds ; not the first 
hint from the people of repudiating an iota even of its 
unjust additions. 

Yet the poor and the unlearned class is the one they 
propose to punish by disfranchisement. 

No wonder the humbler class looks on the whole 
scene with alarm. They see their dearest right in peril. 
When the easy class conspires to steal, what wonder 
the humbler class draws together to defend itself? 
True, universal suffrage is a terrible power ; and, with 
all the great cities brought into subjection to the dan- 
gerous classes by grog, and Congress sitting to register 
the decrees of capital, both sides may well dread the 
next move. Experience proves that popular govern- 
ments are the best protectors of life and property. But 
suppose they were not, Bancroft allows that " the fears 
of one class are no measure of the rights of another." 

Suppose that universal suffrage endangered peace and 
threatened property. There is something more valuable 
than wealth, there is something more sacred than peace. 
As Humboldt says, " The finest fruit earth holds up to 
its Maker is a man." To ripen, lift, and educate a man 
is the first duty. Trade, law, learning, science, and 
religion are only the scaffolding wherewith to build a 
man. Despotism looks down into the poor man's cradle, 
and knows it can crush resistance and curb ill-will. 
Democracy sees the ballot in that baby-hand ; and self- 
ishness bids her put integrity on one side of those baby 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 21 

footsteps and intelligence on the other, lest her own 
hearth be in peril. Thank God for his method of tak- 
ing bonds of wealth and culture to share all their bless- 
ings- with the humblest soul he gives to their keeping ! 
The American should cherish as serene a faith as his 
fathers had. Instead of seeking a coward safety by 
battening down the hatches and putting men back into 
chains, he should recognize that God places him in this 
peril that he may work out a noble security by concen- 
trating all moral forces to lift this weak, rotting, and 
dangerous mass into sunlight and health. The fathers 
touched their highest level when, with stout-hearted 
and serene faith, they trusted God that it was safe to 
leave men with all the rights he gave them. Let us 
be worthy of their blood, and save this sheet-anchor of 
the race, — universal suffrage, — God's church, God's 
school, God's method of gently binding men into com- 
monwealths in order that they may at last melt into 
brothers. 

I urge on college-bred men, that, as a class, they fail 
in republican duty when they allow others to lead in 
the agitation of the great social questions which stir and 
educate the age. Agitation is an old word with a new 
meaning. Sir Robert Peel, the first English leader who 
felt himself its tool, defined it to be "marshalling the 
conscience of a nation to mould its laws." Its means 
are reason and argument, — no appeal to arms. Wait 
patiently for the growth of public opinion. That se- 
cured, then every step taken is taken forever. An 
abuse once removed never re-appears in history. The 
freer a nation becomes, the more utterly democratic in 
its form, the more need of this outside agitation. Par- 
ties and sects laden with the burden of securing their 
own success cannot afford to risk new ideas. " Predom- 
inant opinions," said Disraeli, "are the opinions of a 



22 THE SCHOLAR IN A KEPUBLIC. 

class that is vanishing." The agitator must stand out- 
side of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candi- 
date to elect, no party to save, no object but truth, — to 
tear a question open and riddle it with light. 

In all modern constitutional governments, agitation 
is the only peaceful method of progress. Wilberforce 
and Clarkson, Rowland Hill and Romilly, Cobden and 
John Bright, Garrison and O'Connell, have been the 
master spirits in this new form of crusade. Rarely in 
this country have scholarly men joined, as a class, 
in these great popular schools, in these social move- 
ments which make the great interests of society " crash 
and jostle against each other like frigates in a storm." 

It is not so much that the people need us, or will 
feel any lack from our absence. They can do without 
us. By sovereign and superabundant strength they 
can crush their way through all obstacles. 

" They will march prospering, — not through our presence ; 
Songs will inspirit them, — not from our lyre ; 
Deeds will be done — while we boast our quiescence ; 
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bid aspire." 

The misfortune is, we lose a God-given opportunity 
of making the change an unmixed good, or with the 
slightest possible share of evil, and are recreant beside 
to a special duty. These " agitations " are the oppor- 
tunities and the means God offers us to refine the taste, 
mould the character, lift the purpose, and educate the 
moral sense of the masses, on whose intelligence and 
self-respect rests the state. God furnishes these texts. 
He gathers for us this audience, and only asks of our 
coward lips to preach the sermons. 

There have been four or five of these great oppor- 
tunities. The crusade against slavery — that grand 
hypocrisy which poisoned the national life of two 



THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 23 

generations — was one, — a conflict between two civil- 
izations which threatened to rend the Union. Al- 
most every element among us was stirred to take a 
part in the battle. Every great issue, civil and moral, 
was involved, — toleration of opinion, limits of au- 
thority, relation of citizen to law, place of the Bible, 
priest and layman, sphere of woman, question of race, 
state rights and nationality ; and Channing testified 
that free speech and free printing owed their preser- 
vation to the struggle. But the pulpit flung the Bible 
at the reformer; law visited him with its penalties; 
society spewed him out of its mouth ; bishops ex- 
purgated the pictures of their Common Prayer books ; 
and editors omitted pages in republishing English his- 
tory ; even Pierpont emasculated his Class-book ; Ban- 
croft remodelled his chapters; and Everett carried 
Washington through thirty States, remembering to 
forget the brave words the wise Virginian had left on 
record warning his countrymen of this evil. Amid this 
battle of the giants, scholarship sat dumb for thirty 
years until imminent deadly peril convulsed it into 
action, and colleges, in their despair, gave to the army 
that help they had refused to the marketplace and the 
rostrum. 

There was here and there an exception. That earth- 
quake scholar at Concord, whose serene word, like a 
whisper among the avalanches, topples down super- 
stitions and prejudices, was at his post, and, with half 
a score of others, made the exception that proved the 
rule. Pulpits, just so far as they could not boast of 
culture, and nestled closest down among the masses, 
were infinitely braver than the "spires and antique 
towers " of stately collegiate institutions. 

Then came reform of penal legislation, — the effort 
to make law mean justice, and substitute for its bar- 



24 THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 

barism Christianity and civilization. In Massachusetts 
Rantoul represents Beccaria and Livingston, Mackin- 
tosh and Romilly. I doubt if he ever had one word of 
encouragement from Massachusetts letters; and, with 
a single exception, I have never seen, till within a 
dozen years, one that could be called a scholar active 
in moving the Legislature to reform its code. 

" The London Times " proclaimed, twenty years ago, 
that intemperance produced more idleness, crime, dis- 
ease, want, and misery, than all other causes put to- 
gether ; and " The Westminster Review " calls it a 
" curse that far eclipses every other calamity under 
which we suffer." Gladstone, speaking as Prime Minis- 
ter, admitted that "greater calamities are inflicted on 
mankind by intemperance than by the three great his- 
torical scourges, — war, pestilence, and famine." De 
Quincey says, " The most remarkable instance of a com- 
bined movement in society which history, perhaps, will 
be summoned to notice, is that which, in our day, has 
applied itself to the abatement of intemperance. Two 
vast movements are hurrying into action by velocities 
continually accelerated, — the great revolutionary move- 
ment from political causes concurring with the great 
physical movement in locomotion and social intercourse 
from the gigantic power of steam. At the opening of 
such a crisis, had no third movement arisen of resistance 
to intemperate habits^ there would have been ground of 
despondency as to the melioration of the human race." 
These are English testimonies, where the state rests 
more than half on bayonets. Here we are trying to 
rest the ballot-box on a drunken people. " We can 
rule a great city," said Sir Robert Peel, " America can- 
not ; " and he cited the mobs of New York as sufficient 
proof of his assertion. 

Thoughtful men see that up to this hour the govern- 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 25 

ment of great cities has been with us a faihire ; that 
worse than the dry-rot of legislative corruption, than 
the rancor of party spirit, than Southern barbarism, 
than even the tyranny of incorporated wealth, is the 
giant burden of intemperance, making universal suf- 
frage a failure and a curse in every great city. Schol- 
ars who play statesmen,^ and editors who masquerade 
as scholars, can waste much excellent anxiety that 
clerks shall get no office until they know the exact 
date of Caesar's assassination, as well as the latitude 
of Pekin, and the Rule of Three. But while this cru- 
sade — the temperance movement — has been, for sixty 
years, gathering its facts and marshalling its arguments, 
rallying parties, besieging legislatures and putting great 
States on the witness-stand as evidence of the sound- 
ness of its methods, scholars have given it nothing but 
a sneer. But if universal suffrage ever fails here for 
a time, — permanently it cannot fail, — it will not be 
incapable civil service, nor an ambitious soldier, nor 
Southern vandals, nor venal legislatures, nor the greed 
of wealth, nor boy statesmen rotten before they are 
ripe, that will put universal suffrage into eclipse : it 
will be rum intrenched in great cities and commanding 
every vantage ground. 

Social science affirms that woman's place in society 
marks the level of civilization. From its twilight in 
Greece, through the Italian worship of the Virgin, the 
dreams of chivalry, the justice of the civil law, and the 
equality of French society, we trace her gradual recog- 
nition ; while our common law, as Lord Brougham con- 
fessed, was, with relation to women, the opprobrium of 
the age and of Christianity. For forty years, plain men 
and women, working noiselessly, have washed away 
that opprobrium ; the statute-books of thirty States 
have been remodelled, and woman stands to-day almost 



26 THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 

face to face with her last claim, — the ballot. It has 
been a weary and thankless, though successful, strug- 
gle. But if there be any refuge from that ghastly 
curse, the vice of great cities, — before which social 
science stands palsied and dumb, — it is in this more 
equal recognition of woman. If, in this critical battle 
for universal suffrage, — our fathers' noblest legacy to 
us, and the greatest trust God leaves in our hands, — 
there be any weapon, which, once taken from the ar- 
mory, will make victory certain, it will be, as it has 
been in art, literature, and society, summoning woman 
into the political arena. 

But, at any rate, up to this point, putting suffrage 
aside, there can be no difference of opinion : every thing 
born of Christianity, or allied to Grecian culture or 
Saxon law, must rejoice in the gain. The literary 
class, until half a dozen years, has taken note of this 
great uprising only to fling every obstacle in its way. 
The first glimpse we get of Saxon blood in history is 
that line of Tacitus in his "Germany," which reads, 
" In all grave matters they consult their women." 
Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung away 
Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put 
under its foot fastidious scholarship and squeamish 
fashion, some second Tacitus, from the valley of the 
Mississippi, will answer to him of the Seven Hills, " In 
all grave questions we consult our women." 

I used to think that then we could say to letters as 
Henry of Navarre wrote to the Sir Philip Sidney of 
his realm, Crillon, "the bravest of the brave," "We 
have conquered at Arques, et tu riy etais pas, Crillon" 
— "You were not there, my Crillon." But a second 
thought reminds me that what claims to be literature 
has been always present in that battle-field, and always 
in the ranks of the foe. 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 27 

Ireland is another touchstone which reveals to us 
how absurdly we masquerade in democratic trappings 
while we have gone to seed in tory distrust of the peo- 
ple ; false to every duty, which, as eldest-born of demo- 
cratic institutions, we owe to the oppressed, and careless 
of the lesson every such movement may be made in 
keeping public thought clear, keen, and fresh as to 
principles which are the essence of our civilization, the 
groundwork of all education in republics. 

Sydney Smith said, " The moment Ireland is men- 
tioned the English seem to bid adieu to common sense, 
and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity 
of idiots." "As long as the patient will suifer, the 
cruel will kick. ... If the Irish go on withholding and 
forbearing, and hesitating whether this is the time for 
discussion or that is the time, they will be laughed 
at another century as fools, and kicked for another 
century as slaves." Byron called England's Union with 
Ireland " the union of the shark with his prey." Ben- 
tham's conclusion, from a survey of five hundred years 
of European history, was, " Only by making the ruling 
few uneasy can the oppressed many obtain a particle 
of relief." Edmund Burke — Burke, the noblest fig- 
ure in the Parliamentary history of the last hundred 
years, greater than Cicero in the senate and almost 
Plato in the academy — Burke affirmed, a century ago, 
" Ireland has learnt at last that justice is to be had from 
England, only when demanded at the sword's point." 
And a century later, only last year, Gladstone himself 
proclaimed in a public address in Scotland, " England 
never concedes any thing to Ireland except when 
moved to do so by fear." 

When we remember these admissions, we ought to 
clap our hands at every fresh Irish " outrage," as a par- 
rot-press styles it ; aware that it is only a far-off echo 



y 



28 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 

of the musket-shots that rattled against the Old State 
House on the 5th of March, 1770, and of the war- 
whoop that made the tiny spire of the Old South trem- 
ble when Boston rioters emptied the three India tea- 
ships into the sea, — welcome evidence of living force 
and rare intelligence in the victim, and a sign that the 
day of deliverance draws each hour nearer. Cease 
ringing endless changes of eulogy on the men who 
made North's Boston port-bill a failure while every 
leading journal sends daily over the water wishes for 
the success of Gladstone's copy of the bill for Ireland. 
If all rightful government rests on consent, — if, as the 
French say, you " can do almost any thing with a bayo- 
net except sit on it," — be at least consistent, and de- 
nounce the man who covers Ireland with regiments to 
hold up a despotism, which, within twenty months, he 
has confessed rests wholly upon fear. 

Then note the scorn and disgust with which we 
gather up our garments about us and disown the Sam 
Adams and William Prescott, the George Washington 
and John Brown, of St. Petersburg, the spiritual de- 
scendants, the living representatives, of those who 
make our history worth any thing in the world's annals, 
— the Nihilists. 

Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of 
a people crushed under an iron rule. Nihilism is evi- 
dence of life. When " order reigns in Warsaw," it is 
spiritual death. Nihilism is the last weapon of victims 
choked and manacled beyond all other resistance. It 
is crushed humanity's only means of making the op- 
pressor tremble. God means that unjust power shall 
be insecure ; and every move of the giant, prostrate in 
chains, whether it be to lift a single dagger or stir a 
city's revolt, is a lesson in justice. One might well , 
tremble for the future of the race if such a despotism 



THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 29 

could exist without provoking the bloodiest resistance. 
I honor Nihilism ; since it redeems human nature from 
the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up only of 
heartless oppressors and contented slaves. Every line 
in our history, every interest of civilization, bids us 
rejoice when the tyrant grows pale and the slave rebel- 
lious. We cannot but pity the suffering of any human 
being, however richly deserved ; but such pity must 
not confuse our moral sense. Humanity gains. Chat- 
ham rejoiced when our fathers rebelled. For every 
single reason they alleged, Russia counts a hundred, 
each one ten times bitterer than any Hancock or 
Adams could give. Sam Johnson's standing toast in 
Oxford port was, "Success to the first insurrection of 
slaves in Jamaica," a sentiment Southey echoed. "Es- 
chew cant," said that old moralist. But of all the 
cants that are canted in this canting world, though the 
cant of piety may be the worst, the cant of Americans 
bewailing Russian Nihilism is the most disgusting. 

I know what reform needs, and aU it needs, in a land 
where discussion is free, the press untrammelled, and 
where public halls protect debate. There, as Emerson 
says, "What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, 
and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow 
the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day 
after is the charter of nations." Lieber said, in 1870, 
" Bismarck proclaims to-day in the Diet the very princi- 
ples for which we were hunted and exiled fifty years 
ago." ^ Submit to risk your daily bread, expect social 
ostracism, count on a mob now and then, " be in ear- 
nest, don't equivocate, don't excuse, don't retreat a sin- 
gle inch," and you will finally be heard. No matter 
how long and weary the waiting, at last, — 

" Ever the truth comes uppermost, 
And ever is justice done." 



30 THE SCHOLAR IN A KEPUBLIC. 

** For Humanity sweeps onward : 
Where to-day the martyr stands, 
On the morrow crouches Judas 
With the silver in his hands ; 

Far in front the cross stands ready, 

And the crackling fagots burn, 
While the hooting mob of yesterday 

In silent awe return 
To gleaTi up the scattered ashes 

Into History's golden um." 

In such a land he is doubly and trebly guilty, who, 
except in some most extreme case, disturbs the sober 
rule of law and order. 

But such is not Russia. In Russia there is no press, 
no debate, no explanation of what government does, no 
remonstrance allowed, no agitation of public issues. 
Dead silence, like that which reigns at the summit of 
Mont Blanc, freezes the whole empire, long ago de- 
scribed as "a despotism tempered by assassination." 
Meanwhile, such despotism has unsettled the brains of 
the ruling family, as unbridled power doubtless made 
some of the twelve Caesars insane : a madman, sporting 
with the lives and comfort of a hundred million of men. 
The young girl whispers in her mother's ear, under a 
ceiled roof, her pity for a brother knouted and dragged 
half dead into exile for his opinions. The next week 
she is stripped naked, and flogged to death in the public 
square. No inquiry, no explanation, no trial, no pro- 
test, one dead uniform silence, the law of the tyrant. 
Where is there ground for any hope of peaceful change ? 
Where the fulcrum upon which you can plant any pos- 
sible lever? 

Macchiavelli's sorry picture of poor human nature 
would be fulsome flattery if men could keep still under 
such oppression. No, no ! in such a land dynamite and 
the dagger are the necessary and proper substitutes for 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 31 

Faneuil Hall and " The Daily Advertiser." Any thing 
that will make the madman quake in his bedchamber, 
and rouse his victims into reckless and desperate resist- 
ance. This is the only view an American, the child jof 
1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any other un- 
settles and perplexes the ethics of our civilization. 

Born within sight of Bunker Hill, in a commonwealth 
which adopts the motto of Algernon Sidney, sub lib- 
ertate quietem (" accept no peace without liberty "), 
— son of Harvard, whose first pledge was " Truth," 
citizen of a republic based on the claim that no govern- 
ment is rightful unless resting on the consent of the 
people, and which assumes to lead in asserting the rights 
of humanity, — I at least can say nothing else and noth- 
ing less — no, not if every tile on Cambridge roofs were 
a devil hooting my words ! 

I shall bow to any rebuke from those who hold Chris- 
tianity to command entire non-resistance. But criticism 
from any other quarter is only that nauseous hypocrisy, 
which, stung by threepenny tea-tax, piles Bunker Hill 
with granite and statues, prating all the time of patriot- 
ism and broadswords, while, like another Pecksniff, i^ 
recommends a century of dumb submission and entire 
non-resistance to the Russians, who, for a hundred years, 
have seen their sons by thousands dragged to death or 
exile, no one knows which, in this worse than Venetian 
mystery of police, and their maidens flogged to death 
in the market-place, and who share the same fate if they 
presume to ask the reason why. 

" It is unfortunate," says Jefferson, " that the efforts 
of mankind to secure the freedom of which they have 
been deprived should be accompanied with violence and 
even with crime. But while we weep over the means, 
we must pray for the end." Pray fearlessly for such 
ends : there is no risk ! " Men are all tories by nature," 



32 THE SCHOLAR IN A EEPUBLIC. 

says Arnold, "when tolerably well off: only monstrous 
injustice and atrocious cruelty can rouse them." Some 
talk of the rashness of the uneducated classes. Alas ! 
ignorance is far oftener obstinate than rash. Against 
one French Revolution — that scarecrow of the ages — 
weigh Asia, " carved in stone," and a thousand years of 
Europe, with her half-dozen nations meted out and 
trodden down to be the dull and contented footstools 
of priests and kings. The customs of a thousand years 
ago are the sheet-anchor of the passing generation, so 
deeply buried, so fixed, that the most violent efforts of 
the maddest fanatic can drag it but a hand's-breadth. 

Before the war Americans were like the crowd in 
that terrible hall of Eblis which Beckford painted fof 
us, — each man with his hand pressed on the incurable 
sore in his bosom, and pledged not to speak of it : com- 
pared with other lands, we were intellectually and 
morally a nation, of cowards. 

When I first entered the Roman States, a custom- 
house official seized all my French books. In vain I 
held up to him a treatise by F^nelon, and explained 
that it was by a Catholic archbishop of Cambray. 
Gruffly he answered, " It makes no difference : it is 
French."' As I surrendered the volume to his remorse- 
less grasp, I could not but honor the nation which had 
made its revolutionary purpose so definite that despot- 
ism feared its very language. I only wished that 
injustice and despotism everywhere might one day 
have as good cause to hate and to fear every thing 
American. 

At last that disgraceful seal of slave complicity is 
broken. Let us inaugurate a new departure, recognize 
that we are afloat on the current of Niagara, — eternal 
vigilance the condition of our safety, — that we are 
irrevocably pledged to the world not to go back to 



THE SCHOLAR IN A REPUBLIC. 33 

bolts and bars, — could not if we would, and would not 
if we could. Never again be ours the fastidious 
scholarship that shrinks from rude contact with the 
masses. Very pleasant it is to sit high up in the 
world's theatre and criticise the ungraceful struggles 
of the gladiators, shrug one's shoulders at the actors' 
harsh cries, and let every one know that but for " this 
villanous saltpetre you would yourself . have been a 
soldier." But Bacon says, " In the theatre of man's 
life, God and his angels only should be lookers-on." 
" Sin is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam, 
by putting him to sleep." "Very beautiful," says 
Richter, " is the eagle when he floats with outstretched 
wings aloft in the clear blue ; but sublime when he 
plunges down through the tempest to his eyry on 
the cliff, where his unfledged young ones dwell and 
are starving." Accept proudly the analysis of Fisher 
Ames : " A monarchy is a man-of-war, stanch, iron- 
ribbed, and resistless when under full sail -, yet a single 
hidden rock sends her to the bottom. Our republic is 
a raft, hard to steer, and your feet always wet ; but 
nothing can sink her." If the Alps, piled in cold and 
silence, be the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take 
the ever-restless ocean for ours, — only pure because 
never still. 

Journalism must have more self-respect. Now it 
praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a 
good word from nine-tenths of our journals is worth- 
less. In burying our Aaron Burrs, both political par- 
ties — in order to get the credit of magnanimity — 
exhaust the vocabulary of eulogy so thoroughly that 
there is nothing left with which to distinguish our 
John Jays. The love of a good name in life and a fair 
reputation to survive us — that strong bond to well- 
domg — is lost where every career, however stained, is 



^ 



34 THE SCHOLAR IN A KEPUBLTC. 

covered with the same fulsome flattery, and where what 
men say in the streets is the exact opposite of what 
they say to each other. De mortuis nil nisi bonum most 
men translate, " Speak only good of the dead." I pre- 
fer to construe it, " Of the dead say nothing unless you 
can tell something good." And if the sin and the 
recreancy have been marked and far-reaching in their 
evil, even the charity of silence is not permissible. 

To be as good as our fathers we must be better. 
They silenced their fears and subdued their prejudices, 
inaugurating free speech and equality with no prece- 
dent on the file. Europe shouted "Madmen!" and 
gave us forty years for the shipwreck. With serene 
faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. 
Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great 
cities. Intrench labor in sufficient bulwarks against 
that wealth, which, without the tenfold strength erf 
modern incorporation, wrecked the Grecian and Roman 
States ; and, with a sterner effort still, summon women 
into civil life as. re-enforcement to our laboring ranks in 
the effort to make our civilization a success. 

Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking 
ever backward. 

*' New occasions teach new duties ; 
Time makes ancient good uncouth ; 
They must upward still, and onward, 
Who would keep abreast of Truth. 
Lo! before us gleam her camp-fires I 
We ourselves must Pilgrims be, 
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly 
Through the desperate winter sea, 
Nor attempt the Future's portal 
With the Past's blood-rusted key." 



NOTES. 



Note 1. — Page 6. 

" Kead me any thing but history, for history must be false." — Sir 
Robert Walpole. 

" The records of the past are not complete enough to enable the 
most diligent historian to give a connected narrative in which there 
shall not be many parts resting on guesses or inferences or unauthen- 
ticated rumors. He may guess himself, or he may report other peo- 
ple's guesses; but guesses there must be." — Spedding, Life of 
Bacon, vol. vi. p. 76. 

Note 2. — Page 25. 
For George William Curtis, the leader of the civil-service reform, 
I have the most sincere respect. His place as statesman, scholar) 
and refonner is such, and so universally recognized, that praise from 
me virould be almost impertinence. But a large proportion of the 
party in New York, and a still larger proportion of its adherents in 
Massachusetts, justify all I have said of it and them. 

My plan of civil-service reform would be the opposite of what they 
propose. I should seek a remedy for the evils they describe in a 
wholly different direction from theirs, — in fearless recourse to a 
further extension of the democratic principles of our institutions. 

Let each district choose its own postmaster and custom-house offi- 
cials. This course would appeal to the best sense and sober second 
thought of each district. Eesponsibility would purify and elevate 
the masses, while government would be relieved from that mass of 
patronage which debauches it. 

Their plan is impracticable, and ought to be; for it contravenes 
the fundamental idea of our institutions, and contemplates a coterie 
of men kept long in office, — largely independent of the people, — a 
miniature aristocracy, filled with a dangerous esprit de corps. The 
liberal party in England has long felt the dead weight and obstructive 



36 NOTES. 

influence of such a class. The worst element at Washington in 1861, 
the one that hated Lincoln most bitterly, and gave him the most 
trouble, — the one that resisted the new order of things most angrily 
and obstinately, and put the safety of the city into most serious peril, 
— was the body of old oflBce-holders, poisoned with length of oflBcial 
life, scoflBng at the people as intrusive intermeddlers ; men in whom 
something like a fixed tenure of office had killed all sympathy with 
the democratic tendency of our system. 

Some might fear that our government could not be carried on 
without this patronage. 

Hamilton is quoted as saying, " Purge the British Government of 
its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representa- 
tion, and it would become an impracticable government." 

The British Government has been pretty well purged, and its pop- 
ular branch comes now very near to equality of representation. Yet, 
spite of Hamilton's prophecy, the machine still works, and works 
better and better for every successive measure of such purification 
and reform. 

So our government, relieved of the weight of this debasing pat- 
ronage, would disappoint the sullen forebodings of Tory misgiving, 
and rise to nobler action. 




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